A footnote on European Maoism

 

“The PPS, established a September 9, 1967 in Vevey, broke off from the Swiss Communist Party (marxist-leninist). According to article 3 of the statutes, the PPS was open to orientations of the left: “socialist, progressive, Maoist, ... etc.” In spite of this unusual political openness, the Spark, the party’s organ, insisted on the Maoist orientation of the party...

Many members of the OAS, as well as former officers of the SS, adhered to the PPS in Vevey...”

- Journal du Valais, Nov. 16, 1978

One of the more peculiar stories of the 60s and 70s in Europe is the unlikely collaboration between the so-called Maoists and the European far-right.  The Sino-Soviet split did not perturb the alliance, tacit or otherwise, between the Communist parties of the Western European states and the Soviet Union. But the official Communist parties did not absorb all the left-leaning demographic. For some of the Ultras, Mao was a much more attractive figure than Brezhnev or Kosygin. Surely communism couldn’t end up as a bunch of meaty faced men in bad suits waving at the tanks and soldiers marching through the Red Square like your standard issue superannuated world war II vets! For the breakaway Maoists, the Soviets and the official communist parties were obviously the real enemy of the revolution.

This was the thinking of some on the left. On the far-right, Mao’s revolution also held a peculiar fascination, due to the fact that it seemed to have been the product of the shock tactics of the urban guerilla. The far-right, since the days of the Cagoule in France and the Putschist in Spain had made a cult of shock tactics. Mao seemed, to this group, a very inspiring model. Plus, the war on the intellectuals that Mao was preaching in the sixites was music to their ears. This was the right spirit! There had long been a China cult among some of the far righties – Ezra Pound was not alone in finding Chinese philosophers a stimulant. Julius Evola, that weirdest of far right gurus, was not only a great fan of tantric yoga but, as well, of certain Chinese classics. Saddle the Tiger, his sixties book that preached to those “men who were a different race from the people of today”, was illustrated – in the french paperback edition – with a Chinese print.

Temperament, at a certain high temperature, beats ideology hands down: ideology just becomes an expression of a certain combination of psychopathological elements. And so it is that there always a certain exchange of positions among ultras that seems, on the level of reason, inexplicable. The person who advocates blowing up buildings to show the Man today has a good chance of becoming the person who advocates blowing up buildings to show the Feminazis tomorrow.

The Maoist ultra-rightists are a footnote in histories of the Cold War: but they are a bloody enough one. They did not make much difference in Europe, although the splinter Swiss Maoist party, the PPS, did help the neo-fascists blow up a public plaza or two in Italy; but they made a big difference in Africa during the time of anti-colonial struggle. The PPS became a front used by the PIDE, the Portuguese secret police formed under the Salazar regime and active not only arresting dissidents in Portugal and giving them a good torture, but also in the Portuguese colonies of Guinea, Angola and Mozambique.

 The Salazarist regime was overthrown in 1974 in what is called the Carnation revolution, a course of events that much disturbed Henry Kissinger. The specter of Eurocommunism has long been relegated to the Exorcist’s book of practical jokes, but back in the day it definitely vibrated in the collective serotonin of  D.C. foreign policy circles. The soldiers who overthrew the regime raided the deserted office of something called Aginter-Press on 13 de  la Rua Prasis, Lisbon, which turned out to be the nexus and vulture’s nest of a paranoid’s nightmare: an organization of CIA cutouts, Gehlen pinheads, Nazi and neo-Nazi zombies, and OAS militants – the latter having earned their spurs as torturers in the Algerian war and as handlers of plastique in the subsequent war against their arch-traitor and villain, De Gaulle – which brought together assassins, false paper mooks, intelligence agencies and the fascist paramilitaries in a loose network  of spy versus commie. Among the papers found in the Aginter archives were documents inventorying the money trail to the PPS – which eventually resulted in the Portuguese government  inquiring about the PPS officially.

I should reveal a parti pris: I despise the Maoists who briefly strutted their stuff in the late sixties and seventies, especially in France. After a suitable period of being street fightin’ leaders, they all discovered Solzhenitsyn and became New Philosophers, from which it was a hop, skip and a million television appearances to becoming neo-cons and cabinet minister whisperers. Some of them and their students are now busy cretinizing the airwaves in France, beating the Islamo-guachiste horse – Macron’s way of out Le Pen-ning Le Pen. What a ride – straight down the toilet bowl. And out of all that group, not once even an interesting book! At least the old thirties fascists had brilliant writers like Leon Daudet and Celine. But I digress...

The PPS was founded by one of those gargoyles that only the sixties could toss up: one  Gerard Bulliard. Bulliard was a product of the Vevey boxing scene, which was apparently competitive enough to send a contingent to Moscow in 1959. Bulliard liked what he saw, and immediately converted to communism. But his experiences back in Switzerland with the communist party could not appease his thirst for a more thrilling Marxist-Leninism – this was a man who wanted a revolutionary KO now. After a trip to Albania, Bulliard, who was fond of founding international revolutionary fronts, which allowed him, after a while, the further delight of expelling heretics from these same international revolutionary fronts, founded the PPS and became not only welcome at the Chinese embassy in Berne, but also welcome to covert meetings with various secret policemen of all types – the Gehlen type, the Portuguese type, the Italian type. The PPS became a front for crooked stuff. It’s newspaper, l’Etincelle – named after Lenin’s paper, the Spark – specialized in denouncing the Soviets, the students, and the Jews. Especially the Jews. Perhaps this shows the influence of one of L’Etincelle’s “journalists”, Robert Leroy. Leroy trailed a colorful past behind him: a member of the Charlemagne SS brigade in the war, a group of French volunteers who fought with the Nazis on the Eastern front; an associate of the plastiqueurs of the OAS; and an agent of the PIDE. L’Etincelle had a couple thousand readers, but that didn’t prevent it from making Leroy the paper’s “correspondent” in Africa, where he interviewed African revolutionaries (who believed they were being interviewed by a Maoist paper) and sharing information with the PIDE. Many of his interviewees were either assassinated or escaped assassination after he interviewed them. Coincidence!

After the Salazar regime was overturned, Bulliard, apparently, turned to other pursuits: fortunetelling, for instance. A good summary of his life was written by Jean-Philippe Chenaux for Commentaire.

"Me, Gérard Bulliard, said Bulliard, I am announcing my death on April 22, 2009, at the age of 82 ...". This unusual ad that appeared on the 24-hour mortuary page (April 28) left more than one reader stunned. Does not the deceased go so far as to publicly confess two "cute sins", "a good trend for" petticoat "and" good food "? The most disturbing thing is when this lover of ladies' thighs insists heavily on his "loyalty in friendships", "loyal friendships" which allowed him to "keep morale up to the end". These must be “post-sixty-ninth” friendships, because Gérard Bulliard made himself known from 1964 to 1969 by his repeated political infidelities and as a great excommunicator of “comrades” at the head of the smallest party. Communist of Western Europe.”

Bulliard is a footnote. At least in Switzerland. FRELIMO in Mozambique might have other ideas.

 

Tove Ditlevsen's Copenhagen Trilogy - a note

 

The program era killed the proletarian novel.

Or perhaps, it died when the cold war turned to modernism. Whatever the causes of death, the corpse seems to be largely unmourned. The disorganization of the working class has extended into our multi-media moronosphere – it is rare thing for a sitcom to feature even a lower middle class protagonist. The suburbs and the professional class won. And specialization won – who among us believes that the garbageman may be reading Marx, or even Upton Sinclair, on the side?

This happened in my lifetime. When I was a young sprout, the above scenario would not have been artistically implausible. I myself, working as a janitor at a Sears Warehouse, spent my breaks reading Wittgenstein, as the dock guys played dominoes. To my mind, the slap of dominoes and the Philosophical Investigations still belong together.

I’ve been reading Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy, and as is the way of your wired reader, I have also been reading around the reviews. My review: read this fucking piece of high and glorious art this year, don’t wait, don’t hesitate. I have noticed that the reviews concentrate on the issue of gender in the books, and skip right over class. This makes some sense, given our numbness to class, but to me this is prole literature at its finest. I class the CT with two other novels – Hamsun’s Hunger, and Christina Stead’s The Man who Loved Children – both, as well, about writers. Writers before the program era. Hunger is an obvious predecessor – Hamsun’s protagonist starves in Copenhagen, living off the paltry sums he earns writing, the whole book a fugue of refusal. The Man who Loved Children is more upscale, the Pollit family being, by ancestry and education, more whitecollar – yet existing on little, as happened in the Great Depression. Stead’s sense of the way a vocation is strangled in youth, and has to strangle back if it is to survive – which is the pattern of Louie Pollit’s childhood – echoes with Tove’s own struggle, against overwhelming odds, to be a poet in a neighborhood where being a steadily employed and unionized factory worker is the ultimate good. The class lines are always blurred when you get down to the details – I think of social categories as more polythetic than absolute, if you know what I mean. What do I mean? I mean, there is a cultural family resemblance between the poorly paid school teacher, the furniture factory worker, and the secretary, even if I could well divide up the labor determinants between productive and non-productive labor.

Typically, the reviews erase the class culture in the Copenhagen Trilogy and impose the neoliberal term: poor. Poverty, as Marx realized early on, is a charity term, not a sociological one. It disguises – as it is meant to – the exploitation of low income labor, dipping it in a vaseline smear of piety and disguised culpability-mongering. Being poor is a pitiable state, as well as one that probably is the individual’s own fault. Being poor is not, and is never, a state created by capitalism in order to exploit labor for profit, that surplus value always being absorbed by the top. When you have the poor and the rich, of course the rich become individuals too – self-made individuals, so smart, so hard working! We all know how the wheels spin on this thing. Hilton Als review in the New Yorker is almost a parody of Clintonism.

“Times are hard. But they’ve always been hard. Tove’s parents met while both were employed at a bakery before the First World War. Ditlev, who was ten years Alfrida’s senior, had been sent to work as a shepherd when he was six. Social advancement was connected to economic advancement, and you couldn’t achieve either without an education.”

Of course, you couldn’t achieve economic advancement without unionism, a big theme in the book, and the connection between education and economic advancement – the era of “human capital” and giving our poors the ability to code! – occurred well after Tove Ditlevsen’s death. Tove’s desire is not really for social advancement in the first two books, it is an actual desire to be a published poet. That one’s passion for art doesn’t translate into economic and social advancement is, for our neolib era, a curious perversion, much less understandable that BDSM.

This isn’t to say that the Copenhagen Trilogy is a leftist tale. The immersion in proletarian culture is shot through with political gestures, but not a lot of political thinking. However, the world here is clearly related to an actually existing class and class consciousness. I find it fascinating that this sign system is so utterly unrecognizable – or at least not very acknowledged – now.

 

Danton's fate: notes on Lukacs, Buchner and Epicurus

 

 

 

“Philippeau, welch trübe Augen! Hast du dir ein Loch in die rote Mütze gerissen? Hat der heilige Jakob ein böses Gesicht gemacht? Hat es während des Guillotinierens geregnet? Oder hast du einen schlechten Platz bekommen und nichts sehen können?” - Herault in Danton’s Death

“Philippeau, what sad eyes! Did you rip a hole in your red cap? Did St. Jacob give you the evil eye? Did it rain during the guillotining? Or did you get a bad seat and couldn’t see anything?”

In 1939, Georg Lukacs, who was living, I believe, in Moscow at the time, published an essay about Georg Büchner with a typically tendentious Lukacs-ian title, Georg Büchner and his Fascist Misrepresentation. It was another potshot in Lukacs’s shooting war on European irrationalism, of which the leading philosophical figure was, of course, Heidegger – although as we all know, Lukacs, in his Weber days, writing things like Soul and Form, got pretty fuckin close to irrationality – thought that yearns to be appreciated for its yearning to be thought - himself. Like a cuckoo in the nest, the yearning pushes out content – but in reality, according to Lukacs, the vacuum of content reflects a plenitude of class interest.

Lukacs’ attack is on Büchner ’s alleged despair, and he alludes to the evidence for it that has been pondered by all Büchner scholars – the letter he wrote to a friend about the French Revolution, which he researched before writing the play.

“For several days now I have taken every opportunity of taking pen in hand, but have found it impossible to put down so much as a single word. I have been studying the history of the Revolution. I have felt as though crushed beneath the fatalism of History. I find in human nature a terrifying sameness, and in the human condition an inexorable force granted to all and to none. The individual is no more than foam on the wave, greatness mere chance, the mastery of genius a puppet play, a ludicrous struggle aganst a branzen law which to acknowledge is the highest achievement, which to master, impossible. I no longer intend to bow down to the parade horses and bystanders of History. I have grown accustomed to the sight of blood. But I am no guillotine blade. The word must is one of the curses with which Mankind is baptized. The saying: It must needs be that offenses come; but woe to him by whom the offense cometh” is terrifying. What is it in us that lies, murders, steals? I no longer care to pursue this thought.”

Of course, as Lukacs pointed out, to make this letter Büchner’s final statement on the matter is unfair. Buchner wrote it – and his play – when he was twenty two. And he had already been active in revolutionary politics. . Lukacs thought that the despair of the letter was, indeed, laced through the play, but that it was absorbed by a dialectical message that formed the real political intelligence of the play. Now, say what you will about this interpretation – and, in his defense, it must be said that nobody had better reason to feel the full fatalism of history than Lukacs in 1939! so his rejection is, in its own way, a little heroic or mad – it is useful for seeing a pattern in the play, a conflict that shatters the temporary synthesis of wisdom and happiness embodied  in the image of Epicurus, the true bourgeois messiah.  As Camille Desmoulins puts it in the first scene: “Der göttliche Epikur und die Venus mit dem schönen Hintern müssen statt der Heiligen Marat und Chalier die Türsteher der Republik werden.” (The divine Epicurus and Venus with her beautiful hind end must become the gatekeeper of the Republic, instead of St. Marat and Chalier.”)

Lukacs points out that the epicurean materialism of the philosophes, which is the philosophical perspective broadly represented by Danton, can’t endure, instinctively opposes, the call to class struggle issued by Robespierre. Lukacs has two very useful grafs on this topic, if you are interested in re-reading re-reading history:

“The central dramatic and tragic significance of the figure of Danton resides in the fact that Buchner, showing exceptional depth of poetic insight, not only laid bare the socio-political crisis in eighteenth century revolutionary endeavours at its turning point in the French Revolution but – and the two are inextricably bound up with each other – at the same time portrayed the ideological crisis of this transition, the crisis of the old mechanistic materialism as the ideology of the bourgeois revolution. The figure of Danton, indeed Danton’s fate, is the tragic embodiment of the contradictins generated by historical developments in the period between 1789 and 1848, contradictions which the old materialism was not able to resolve.

The social chacter of epicurean materialism gets lost along the way. As a result of the objective situation, eighteenth century materialists were in a position to believe that their theory of society and history – and both are essentially idealist in philosophical terms – arose from their materialist epistemology; indeed they belived that they could really derive the course their actions should take from their epicurean materialism. Helvetius says: “Un homme est juste, losque toutes ses actions tendent au bien public (sic).” And he judged himself to have derived the substance of such sociality, and its necessary connection with an ethics of the individual, from Epicurean egotism.”

At which point I am reminded of one of the sayings of Epicurus: “don’t engage in politics.” Or in the Vatican sayings: “We must free ourselves from the prison of public education and politics. 

                                                                         2.

 

When Lukacs uses the phrase, epicurean materialism, to talk about the nature of the Dantonist resistance to Robespierre in Büchner’s play, he is following a theme which was taken up in the 19th century not only by Marx, but by the historians of the French revolution and of the enlightenment.

Emile Dard’s biography of Herault de Sechelles (1903), for instance, is titled “An epicurean under the terror.” When Büchner’s Robespierre denounces the wealthy and the refers to people who ‘used to live in garrets and now roll around in carriages and sin with former marquesses and baronesses’, he is referring – except for the garret – to hedonists like Herault, who was followed about, as he performed his revolutionary duties, including creating a constitution that gave foreigners the right to vote, by a few aristocratic groupies. And Robespierre’s denunciation of ‘vice” and those who ‘declare war on God and property” as a way of secretly supporting the King – whether they know it or not – he is sounding an old Left theme that has become perennial - the warning against the decadent life style - but that had peculiar resonances in the Revolutionary period, when the carry over from the 1780s was so sexualized. Mirabeau, for instance, was famous for his rather famous erotica before he was famous as the revolution's first great orator. The disabused spirit of the young bucks around Danton was simply an extension of the final moment of the Enlightenment – which, contra the philosophy crowd, was codified not in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, but in Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Herault moved in the Valois circle, which met in the Palais Royale, and included Laclos as well as Tallyrand, Sieyes, and others. As Dard puts it, Herault, on his sofa, would become enthusiastic for justice, 'the sole passion that could inflame the sceptics, on the condition that it did not disturb their leisure."

O Herault! I identify.

Deconstructing the rankers

 

 

 

“Nobody will deny that in a world in which everything is connected through cause and effect, and in which no miracles ever happen, each part is a mirror of the whole. If a pea is shot into the Mediterranean, an eye that is sharper than our own but infinitely less fine than the eye that sees all would be able to trace the effect on the coast of China. And what other is a particle of light which contacts the surface of the eye compared to the mass of the brain and its nerves?” This is one of my favorite passages in Lichtenberg. It expresses a great idea, a fantastic idea, the imagery of which has a sort of hypnogogic flickering, as though Lichtenberg had magically been able to recover one of those great ideas that one has just as one is falling asleep, which are forever lost to the consciousness that wakes the next morning. 

I often think of this passage when I read someone assessing the importance of an author or event, especially when they do so to make some invidious point. I thought of this when I read the nasty and falsefooted essay attacking Greenblatt’s The Swerve by the head of Harvard Publishing, Lindsay Waters in a Boundary 2 issue from several years back. Waters essay is an excellent example of the American habit of ranking, and then of attacking the ranked for being ranked too high, as though we were all perpectually taking our SAT.  This passage, for instance: 
“English professors have been proclaiming for decades that they were disseminating subversive ideas that would shake Western civilization to its foundations. They wanted to shock and awe the bourgeoisie. Yet, look who has rocked America and the West to its core: economic theorists, bankers, and accountants—a curious turn of events. Robert E. Lucas Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent, whom I published at the University of Minnesota Press decades before they won Nobel Prizes, were leaders in the production of ideas that deconstructed the international economy. By comparison, the impact of de Man barely measured on the Richter scale.”

Poor De Man! He probably didn’t even know that the chief of the Harvard University Press had a machine that could give us a Richter reading for events! Although one suspects that perhaps Waters doesn’t exactly understand his own machine. Certainly the description of Lucas’s work has a certain distinct odor of bullshit. “Deconstructed the international economy” did he? I can’t imagine that Lucas thinks of himself as deconstructing the international economy. As far as I can tell, Lucas is mostly connected with the model of Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium and the idea that expectations of economic actors are affected by government regulation in such a way as to make such regulation broadly inefficient. I wouldn’t exactly say this rocked Western civilization to its core. On the other hand, Waters seems to have a large experience of drunk English professors – because I’ve never read a sober one, beginning with De Man, who promising to shake Western civilization to its foundations. De Man, for all his sins, saw what shaking Western civilization was all about in the 1939-1945 period. Famous for deconstructing the international economy – at the point of a gun.

However, it would shake Western civilization to its foundations if we had some richter scale for the effect of every pea that was cast into the ocean. Contra the head of the Harvard Press, however, I think we can say apriori that such a scale, and the mechanism for applying it, doesn’t exist and will never exist. What Meso-American savant would have guessed that a King and Queen presiding over a podunk peninsula were about to shake the whole order of things by financing the idea of a ratty Italian ship captain? Perhaps the apriori will be reversed when Christ and the Angels descend to earth and begin to judge the quick and the dead. But even in this case, I would bet that Lucas and de Man would be judged to have different effects on different people for different reasons. As would, say, Oprah, Dale Carnegie, and the scribe that wrote the ancient Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor. No one scale will apply. 
 

Geography lesson

 Geography lesson

The clams clamor on the shore

I walk by – a tempus fugitive

leaving behind a bitch’s spoor.

This is life. This is how I live.

We’re all undressed in its big blue eye

- that ill named, that surly Pacific.

Our tsunami will come by and by

- divorce, mass shooting, penny panic

of all the investments we should never have made.

isn’t this life? This is how I live

among tanned life guards in their umbrella shade

the beach is a tempus fugitive.

I’m an Atlantic girl. I see Europe

I see Africa. This is how I live.

I’ve come to Cali and I’ve lost my scope.

I’m homesick, I’m – a tempus fugitive.

- Karen Chamisso

Art for art's sake , motherfuckers

 

Art for art’s sake was born to be the weakling, the easy target, the punching bag. Imagine the effrontery of the thing! If a painting, a piece of music, a poem exists for its own sake, we are dangerously near the point where any dirty sock with a hole in it can stand up and claim a vote in the household. No throwing the sock out without guilt. No throwing the sock out without a little murder.

Art for arts sake is so intolerable, so against common sense, that we immediately feel it is a provocation. Who is behind this nonsense? And our first thought is: must be the artist. Now, it isn’t true that we hate all artists. We love the celebrity ones, the Hemingway or Picasso bio-pic on HBO, which – a plus! – comes with ample script opportunities for female nudity. Click-bait, hein? But the average artist wears no HBO-able glitter, but swans his or her poor ego around, a poser, and we are secretly sure a, that this creature will fail, and b., that the best part will be watching their come-down. Unless of course they are trust-fund kids, in which case our hands are tied. But for the average artist, we have as much respect as we have for the guys in dark alleys showing their pee-pees. However, friends, say what you will about the alley exhibitionist, they don’t ever go around saying pee-pee for pee-pee’s sake.

The for-the-sake of all things was decided long ago, although, yes, we weren’t consulted. Some economist, I think it is Nordhaus, has put a nice little price tag on the end of the world: 600 trillion dollars back in 2000, I think it was. Now this is the ultimate for-the-sake of. Thou shalt have no other gods before me, says that 600 trillion, and we have made damn sure that rule is ruthlessly carried out. It has taken the place of that interior light that Descartes, quaintly, believed we harbored as cogito-s – now we know it is all hard wiring that plugs into no big lightbulb, nothing but firings and misfirings in the internal furniture.

Not of course that we don’t bow down to the price tag of some of those beauties. The lost Van Gogh that some sharpeyed person sold for millions! Now, that is something, and we can all dream of that exchange. Rich people, as is well known, have to spend their money somehow, and be sure they will resell that Van Gogh for some fantastic sum! Profit, as they say, for the sake of profit.

One of the more comic aspects of art-for-art’s sake is we are assured that it is an elitist attitude. Eurocentric, even. Temporarily, we lose our minds and think that artists form an elite. Of course, you can ask your average janitor about that, and I think the answer is no. But because the conversation is usually confined to artists themselves, much lather is put into the elitism biz.

My own humble is that the whole picture of Europe, in which every Irish and Galician peasant is a bearer of “high European culture”, is bogus. Europe, or the West, until the modernizations and wars that destroyed the mostly peasant societies of Europe, was represented by a very small percentage of the population. The population, like any colonial population, had to be “europeanized”, Westernized. Even as the peasants fled into the city, they took their Little Tradition, to use James C. Scott’s term, with them. Scott sorta conflates the little tradition with the oral and the Great Tradition – science, rationality, all the big words that flow out from the poobahs – as textual. I think that goes too far. If you scratch an aristocrat from Louis XIV’s court, you will quickly find the most peasant like beliefs imaginable, such as the belief that you can make certain sacrifices to the devil to attain your ends. As a matter of fact, when the Paris police chief, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, investigated the affair of poisons – the supposedly widespread use of poison among a certain sector of the aristocracy around Louis XIV’s court – he found a whole world of fortunetellers, street corner conjurers, and sellers of love potions in Paris, circa 1677, that would have easily be recognizable, pari passu, to Nahautl speaking villagers in Mexico in the same year.

We can romanticize that Little Tradition or not. One thing we can’t do, though, is pretend that rationality or science or any of that was the predominant mode of thought in Europe ... well, ever.

One of the archaic remnants of belief in the little tradition was that the object had a certain “personality”, a certain integrity. This integrity wasn’t simply a cost or affordance represented by the price system. It was what it was. It was art for art’s sake. And it took a long course of industrialization to beat this idea out of artisans and workers. It still hasn’t gone away: there are peeps saving their lucky socks with the holes in them, and even darning them. It happens. And there are peeps making poems because the poems want them to, not the market or the classroom. Socrates, somewhere, speaks of the conversation he is having with some antagonist as having a “life”. This broader sense of life still trickles into the art world, shamefully. In the Great tradition, we have one word for that kind of thing: masturbation! The unprofitable expenditure of seed, the self-enjoyment that we call self-abuse. You ain’t no kinda artist if somebody, somewhere, doesn’t look at what you are doing and call it masturbation.

I never have understood, by the way, and P.S., who exactly pays the 600 trillion for the end of the world. My heretical thought is ,maybe the end of the world is the end of money, and the world without any people is worth exactly zip, in terms of dollars and sense – common sense. But that’s the kind of sentiment that makes the economists laugh.

Tiresome Tiresome anti-cancel culture and what it is all about

 

I am a big fan of certain reactionary writers. Of pedophiles, racists, misogynists and a buncha sorry ass mandarins. At the same time, I am aware that criticism of these people for being pedophile, racist, misogynist and otherwise showing a sorry ass vibe is true, and that those who consider such criticism part of “cancel culture” have a very odd view of reading and what it entails.

Where does that view come from?

The cancel culture debate is so flatheaded and without fizz that it is stale pop all the way down. The interesting thing about it is that it connects to the current crisis in academia. Namely, in the humanities and social sciences.

 The Cold War policymakers in the West and East saw big advantages in funding academia. The massive expansion of higher education has had enormous social effects, one of which is, in my opinon, understudied – I’d call this the scene of reading.

 

Read the autobiographies of the poobahs of the 19^thcentury – and in particular, women – and you will find that it was not done in a classroom. It was done in Papa’s library, or with books from a lending library; it was done through buying newspapers, it was done in cigar factories by readers, it was done on the hoof. As far as recent literature is concerned, there was no teaching of it in universities. It was only in 1919 that Oxford deigned to produce a syllabus that allowed for the study of 19^thcentury literature. Compare that to universities today:  Oxford now offers a contemporary literature course. Berkeley offers, in its 125E course, the following texts: Diaz, Junot: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Egan, Jennifer: A Visit from the Goon Squad; Harding, Paul: Tinkers; Johnson, Adam: The Orphan Master's Son; McCarthy, Cormac: The Road; Strout, Elizabeth: Olive Kittredge; Tartt, Donna: The Goldfinch.

 This easy acceptance of the latest novels would have given a heart attack to the dons of 1919. Is this philology? They would have moaned.

 In the heyday of the cold war humanities departments, there was a search for transgression. It was, it must be said, a strange search: how could you “teach” the transgressive in an institution that would give you a degree with which you were credentialed to join the great middle managerial class? But the paradoxes of that period of managed capitalism seemed, at the time, less a thing of paradox and more a resolution of the affluent lifestyles to which we were all heir.

 Well, neoliberalism put paid to that notion. The great universities are now run by the same kind of people who run businesses – flatheads looking to stuff their pockets with money and increase the endowment. As for the humanities, that is now a loss leader, a headache for the real job of the university – signing contracts with big pharma, keeping the business school growing, and buying property on which to build unnecessary monuments to donating plutocrats in a win-win of tax avoidance.

 

Unfortunately for the administrators, not all the students, yet, have been roped into taking business inspiration 101 and going on to accounting shenanigans 404. Some of them still tiresomely want to read whole books, often fictions, and even poetry – which is all very fine for 3 minutes a week on the NPR, but otherwise, can you imagine taking it seriously?

 The cancel culture controversy is absurd on so many levels, but the one that truly amuses me is the conservative knuckleheads, who barely got through that Tom Clancy book, and have since gotten their entire knowledge of the maitre from video games, lamenting that we no longer teach, I don’t know, Charles Dicken’s Our Mutual Friend anymore in our classrooms. They have temporarily skipped trolling tweets about you studied fucking English instead of engineering? LOL! They will go back it, though. We live in a time where they armies of ignorance occasionally stand, arms akimbo, to reproach us for boycotting Roman Polanski’s art films from the fifties. Among other reasons, this is why I love cancel culture – it so rouses up the yokels!

 

 

the slave world

 

One of the oublis of the Nazi state was the accelerated construction of a slave economy – the so called “forced laborers” – Zwangsarbeiter.  There are various estimates of the number of forced laborers – by 1944 there were thirty thousand labor camps and over 8 million forced laborers. The extent of the slave system and the speed with which it was set up to intersect with every industry and service in Germany was astonishing. By 1941, 1.5 million Poles were slaves; 1 million French war prisoners were slaves. 2.5 million Soviets, by 1944. 50 percent of the Poles and Soviets were women.

The full awareness that this is what a slave state does – that what the Nazis did in 3 years were what the French, Portugese, Spanish and English did to West Africa for 300 years – seems to have been erased, or at least largely left aside, from the general discussion of slavery. There is a rhetoric among white nationalists in various countries that occasionally discovers white slavery, such as was enormously present in the Mediterranean slave markets of the early modern period; but the claim of ancestral victimage is really just a rhetorical ploy. The real enslavement of one’s grandfather/mother is not claimed, because, I think, the shame of it has a long effect.  The enormous generational shame of, for instance, the French slaves in Germany. The use of slaves everywhere, from the horrors of Peenemünde to the IG factories, is a difficult collective matter to comprehend.  Slavery operates not only as brute force, but a massive campaign to interiorize shame, to create, through beatings and yelling and the regime of humiliation, the untermenschen soul.

In the history books, the forced labor of prisoners is not generally described as slavery. There are many gradations between regimes of forced labor; prisoners of war in the twentieth century, and prisoners in general, are often made to work. The Soviet gulag was a grotesque monstrosity of forced labor. In the case of the Nazi regime, the “prisoners” were not given sentences – the idea that they could one day become, again, free laborers was not even considered by the Nazi legal system. To have a sentence, even a death sentence, is to be recognized by the state. The Nazi regime created a vast system of non-recognition – of social death. Forced laborers were once resistors, or were of the wrong ethnic type – gypsies, Jews, Slavs – and they were captured, herded together packed up and sent, by train or oxcart, to concentration camps, from thence being farmed out to tasks that brought no reward. More than that, ill treatment was often the larger point – forced laborers were marked for death at some point. Although Himmler apparently assured the other Nazi leaders that these subhumans would not be mixed with or seen by the German population, this soon became an impossibility. They went to places like the Heinkel Airworks in Oranienberg, where the population of forced laborers swelled to such an extent that they could no longer be housed impromptu in the cellars of the factory complex, and a camp had to be  built, since they needed at least the laborers to survive at least temporarily; or to Dora, in the underground, where the excavation of the tunnels went on in conditions that were freezing, dustfilled, dark, and low, a true hell into which a force of starved and beaten inmates selected from Buchenwald and tending, statistically, to be French, was jammed.  It was common, in Dora, for the slaves to be assaulted when they went into offices of the German functionaries there, who relaxed from their stressful days by stabbing them with scissors or pencils or beating them with broomhandles, whatever came handiest. Memos were written cautioning functionaries not to do this, since it increased the mortality rate, which thinned out the herd of slaves and impeded the pace of construction.

At some point, we will have to think of the KZ world – a world that overlapped with the extermination camps – and the world of the Gulags and the prison colonies that popped up all over beginning in the late 19^thcentury as elements of the same general phenomenon. Emancipation, to my mind, is the model of what is positive about the Enlightenment – and the way the Enlightenment was financed, directly or indirectly, by slave labor is what made the Enlightenment a shaky ideological phenomenon. But emancipation does not happen all at once, in a decisive lightning stroke. It is revocable, incomplete, and easy to attack. Slavery is always just below the surface of even our contemporary politics. It is not far from us at all.

 

The limits of clarity

 

Clarity – or clearness, a word that blemishes the clear, slightly, with the -ness – has an almost universal claque. It is the rare soul who says anything against it. Such applause for something that is at once so direct and so... hard to define, even vague, is a phenomenon that is worth looking at. There are few papers out there entitled: against clarity. Alison Stone wrote a paper entitled the “Politics of Clarity” (2015) which tries to sort out the utilization of clarity concerns by “analytics” to deflate “continentals”. It is a good paper, and it makes good points about how the call for “clearness” is often used to enforce an ultimately patriarchal norm.

“Pushing this concern further, we might say that the notion of clarity is itself a myth. "Clear" thinking is merely thinking that fits in with, embodies, and fails to challenge the hegemonic power relations of the surrounding society. Such thinking seems "clear" merely because it is familiar, and this is because it is thinking in which dominant power relations are naturalized. To celebrate clarity is to mask the real issue: power.”

Stone’s paper is built on an opposition between “transparency” and the “mask”. Clarity has long been caught up in this opposition – it easily shifts to transparency. It is interesting that the clarity-transparency terminology, when applied to speaking, only work as “masked” metaphors – as metaphors referencing light and vision. Joyful things, one would think. So why is it that clarity so often comes with a ruler to rap the student’s blundering hand – or the continental philosopher’s?

Bryan Magee, writing about clarity in philosophy, makes the argument that clarity is a property of the structure of the philosophical text, and not of the elements – the sentences – that make it up (which sentences instead of paragraphs is one of the unclear things about the essay.) He also inserts a rather astonishing  understanding of these issues through the example of Kant:

“Some philosophers, most importantly Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, lay out a structure like this with the utmost clarity, yet in unclear sentences. In his case it was because he had spent many years thinking his critical philosophy through, but then wrote it down hurriedly because he was afraid of dying before he finished writing the book. The result is clear thinking expressed in unclear sentences.”

I am not sure what this account references. Kant spent years “thinking his critical philosophy” would seem, to me, to mean Kant spent years writing notes on what he was thinking. But for Magee it seems to mean, literally, that Kant built it up in his head, like it is said that Mozart heard his compositions – although unlike Mozart, who supposedly wrote down his compositions without an erasure, Kant, afraid of death, rushed his work. This might be the most doubtful account of the Critique of Pure Reason I’ve ever read – especially in as much as Kant made significant changes in the editions of the Critique, not a thing a man fleeing death tends to do. If Magee were correct, the correlary would be that Kant’s Vor-kritische Schriften are probably written more clearly than his Critical work. I don’t know who claims this – I doubt Magee has actually made the comparison.

However, the notion that the approach of death tends to lend a premonitory obscurity to one’s writing is very much part of the “myth of clarity”. Clarity requires some lifting of stress – a bourgeois insight that, I think, could help us think about what clarity is, why its desireable, and what its limits are.

In Stone’s essay, she points to a classic instance of polemical “clarity-making” – Carnap’s analysis of Heidegger’s phrase, Nichts nichtet – nothing nothings. Stone moves from this to Adorno’s notion that clarity, attached to “common sense”, has a repressive function. It should be noted, though, that Adorno was quite as convinced that Heidegger was speaking “jargon’.

This points to the problem with taking the “analytic” and “continental” schools as homogenous blocks, rather than didactic fictions that arose in the post World War II academic scene. Jargon, Adorno’s word, points to the connection between slangs and subcultures – Adorno’s own prose, to a certain ear, is incorrigibly Weimar-ish, the mixture of Karl Kraus’ attempt to discipline all thought into the bounds of the epigram and sociological terms derived from not only the Marxist but the Simmelian and Weberian traditions.

Am I saying the limits of clarity are the limits of my own subcultural group? This goes too far, I think, exaggerating how far from the main these subcultures are. I admit that Heidegger’s riff on nothing can be danced upon with some glee, but that “analytical” philosophers go all reverent with admiration when Tarksi comes out with the news that a metalogical truth is possible

“A materially correct truth-definition logically entails all instances of the form: (T) «(A) is true if and only if A*, where '«(A)' is a name of the sentence A and 'A*' is its translation into a metalanguage.”

A veritable font of unclarity for the laity,  starting with “materially correct” and moving onto “translation” and “metalanguage.” The notion of the translation seems, uh, to make this whole thing rather  circular – in the best Heideggerian tradition.

Is there a form of clarity that can take into itself our deathhauntedness and our tendency to make explanations more important, and more cumbersome, than the object of explanations? A question for philosophers.